In 1999, members of the UBC community established the Learning Exchange to bring together student volunteers, and non-profit agencies and public schools in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside. Enthusiastic student response led to the doubling of student participation every year. In 2002, the Learning Exchange began working with faculty members to integrate students’ volunteer work into academic courses. This community service-learning (CSL) model has been adopted by UBC as part of its Trek 2010 strategic plan with a commitment to CSL programs that engage at least 10% of UBC students. With funding from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and UBC, the UBC-Community Learning Initiative (UBC-CLI) was created in 2006, to develop innovative approaches to course-based CSL.
The UBC-CLI collaborated with The Office of Learning Technology to create the CSL Project Leaders Community blog. The Project Leaders Community blog is a place for project leaders to share best practices and their experience from planning, to ensuring safety, to project implementation and evaluation. They can add themselves to the blog, and start sharing resources and commenting on posts. It has become a way for project leaders to meet each other.
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